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Next Stop, the West Village

West Village scenes within a few blocks of Bleecker and Perry Streets, clockwise from top left: the crowd at the Magnolia Bakery, outdoor dining at Sant Ambroeus, the new boutiques along Bleecker, the White Horse Tavern.Credit
Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

LIKE any other real New Yorker, I hate to leave the apartment. But I must, of course, to go to the job, restock the cupboards and walk the dogs.

Once I’m out, though, it’s not that bad, because I step out onto Perry Street in the West Village, on the block between Bleecker and West Fourth Streets, which the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission described as “a delightful and interesting street” when it designated the Greenwich Village Historic District in 1969 and protected more than 2,000 historically significant buildings, including all the ones on my block.

This clean, tree-lined stretch of Perry, still delightful and interesting, and thanks to the commission, still residential, intimate and human in scale, a survivor of the city’s earlier fabric, is also one of the prettiest streets in Manhattan.

Over at No. 66, a stately Italianate brownstone from 1866, another busload of tourists, mostly women, has swarmed the block, and they are taking turns posing for pictures as they sit on the high stoop. They’re on the daily “Sex and the City” Tour ($37 each), and these are the very steps that Carrie Bradshaw, the character played by Sarah Jessica Parker, ran up and down at her apartment, which on the show was supposed to be in the East 70s.

“Yo,” I say as I pass them, “You know this house is from the 1800s, and so are most of the others on the street. If you like No. 66, check out the brownstone at No. 70, the best on the block, French Second Empire. Look over there — more Italianate, and over there, there are old Federals, there’s a Beaux-Arts, over there a bit of Romanesque Revival.”

They appear unimpressed and say nothing in return, but I’ve just performed one of the labors that come with being a Villager: imparting Village lore to everyone and anyone.

A friend visiting and walking with me on, say, Bedford Street, will hear, “That’s the oldest house in the Village that’s still standing, from 1799” (No. 77), and “That’s the narrowest house in the city — nine and a half feet wide; Edna St. Vincent Millay lived there (No. 75 ½).” On Grove Street, it’s “They say John Wilkes Booth plotted Lincoln’s assassination here” (No. 45). On Bank Street, it’s “Here’s where Lauren Bacall lived when she was crowned Miss Greenwich Village 1942” (No. 75).

Small-town chauvinism? Fact, or myth and exaggeration? In the Village, we mix it all together and call it history. If you want to be here, be prepared to take on the unpaid job of learning it, repeating it, and along with the buildings, preserving it. Living in the Village isn’t all Magnolia cupcakes.

The other day, a hot one, Stephen Saunders, the owner of the End of History, the little shop on Hudson Street off Perry with the huge selection of 1950s and ’60s glass, was peeling off dozens of movie posters that had been plastered over some scaffolding on the corner. He said he’d also taken them down a couple of days before but they had gone right back up. “What kind of people would do this in a historic district?” he said as he went about his Village duty.

It also falls to us Old Villagers to keep the neighborhood’s reputation alive, handing down the oral history so the Village will forever be remembered as the one true American artistic and intellectual bohemia, the place from which every American enlightenment sprung: Beatniks, sexual freedom, Abstract Expressionism, gay lib, women’s lib, folk music, counterculturalism and so on. I sometimes add that the Village was where humans learned to control fire.

We must be sure to take the New Villagers to the White Horse Tavern and always say, “This is where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death in 1953.” I first heard that in the ’60s, and despite the fact that he died days after that drinking bout and in spite of evidence that his death was probably caused by drugs given him by a doctor for his gout, the story is still repeated.

His picture still hangs at the White Horse, no longer the dark longshoreman’s bar of Thomas’s day, or with the Bob Dylan-filled jukebox of mine. Now young Wall Streeters and their like fill the bar after work, and tourists fill the outside dining tables on weekends.

Old Villagers always begin discussions by sadly explaining that the Village just isn’t what it used to be. That was passed on to me when I moved here, in early 1979. Then the crime rate fell, and everyone figured it was safe to start moving downtown, and these days, the moneyed gentrification that followed is blamed.

“Whenever I’m here,” Jane Jacobs, the eloquent urbanist (who can speak of the West Village without mentioning her?), told The New Yorker during a visit two years ago, “I go back to look at our house, 555 Hudson Street, and I know that I could never afford it now.”

Photo

The Sex and the City brownstone at 66 Perry.
Credit
Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

Last year, Matthew Broderick, who has bought, with his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, a gorgeous multimillion-dollar town house on Charles Street, just a couple of blocks from the old Jacobs house, told New York magazine that the Village of his youth “was definitely more bohemian” but that “now it’s very cleaned up and a lot richer.”

I heard a variation last week. Two women were walking by on West Fourth Street, at Bank, and one said, “The Village just isn’t very interesting anymore.”

At least they didn’t need directions. Another of our burdens is aiding navigation. Outsiders, especially uptowners, always seem to need directions here, which, unlike those for the grid territories, require some time and patience. “Do you mean Greenwich Avenue or Greenwich Street?” “Do you know where on West Fourth, what number, because it meanders all over the Village, and intersects with West 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th and Horatio, Jane, Bank, Perry, Charles, Christopher, Grove, Barrow and beyond?” Giving directions for Waverly Place, which intersects with Waverly Place, is no picnic either. Neither was Chumley’s.

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Those two women were half-right. The colorful bohemia has crossed the tracks, leaving a respectable neighborhood of high rents, big mortgages and little children.

The children replaced the gays — the men have left for Chelsea, the women for Park Slope. A shop for maternity clothes replaced a longtime gay bookstore on Hudson, and across the street from that shop is one just for children’s haircuts. Also on the street now is a shop for children’s clothes and chairs and a children’s drugstore. In the future, the Village will spawn the Playground Uprising, followed by the annual Child Pride Parade.

The street that the two women were walking on, West Fourth, has become a bustling restaurant row from Seventh Avenue South to West 12th, with Cafe Cluny, La Focaccia, Tartine, Osteria del Sole, Sant Ambroeus, Extra Virgin, Mary’s Fish Camp and Chow Bar joining the old Sevilla and Corner Bistro.

Even the most nostalgic West Villagers don’t complain about that — everyone’s got to eat. But the change to Bleecker has brought endless complaint. A few years ago, the designer Marc Jacobs opened a shop near Magnolia Bakery and started a stampede of tiny, tony boutiques for branded goods.

Now compressed on two and a half blocks of Bleecker, from West 11th Street to Perry and Perry to Charles, there are 19 of these shops, including 4 Marc Jacobs shops; 3 Ralph Laurens; a Mulberry; an Intermix; an Olive & Bette’s; and a Juicy Couture. Coach is opening two shops next month, and Tommy Hilfiger is on his way.

Most of the neighbors don’t like the crowds of young upscale shoppers. I don’t buy $1,200 handbags, but these shops make for more interesting window-shopping than the dowdy, dusty antiques stores that some replaced. A number of the buildings — all with landmark status — were in disrepair, and the boutiques have also brought cleaning, repointing and painting.

They, along with the restaurants and the town houses, have brought a lot of celebrities, too, and exchanging celebrity encounters has become the neighborhood’s new pastime. If someone says, “I saw Bernadette Peters walking down Bleecker,” I say: “Oh yeah, Carly Simon asked me for directions on Bleecker. Lou Reed was at brunch outside at Sant Ambroeus, and Ralph Lauren was there for dinner. Alec Baldwin got out of a limo to get a Magnolia cupcake but went right back in when he realized he had to wait in line.”

Before the celebrities, we took pride in the writers and artists nurtured in the Village, like Eugene O’Neill, E. E. Cummings, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Jack Kerouac, Jasper Johns and so on. The atrocious cost of residency has made it impossible for artists of the starving class to live here, and now we picket the ones who can afford to. (Picketing one another is also a job that regularly falls to the guardians of ZIP code 10014.)

The photographer Annie Leibovitz was picketed over the very slow pace of renovation on her 1830s brick houses at Greenwich Street and West 11th.

The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation led the protests there, and also at Julian Schnabel’s old home at 360 West 11th, which is just past Washington Street, where the 1969 landmark district ends and the onetime industrial area known as the Far West Village begins. Mr. Schnabel, the superstar of the 1980s art market, had decided to cash in on this decade’s real estate market by adding an 11-story condo tower. The artist, who in the past has painted on linoleum, recently revealed his tower. It is Pepto-Bismol pink.

Property owners and developers had been seeing red meat all around the Far West Village, and the historic society moved quickly to extend the landmark district and put the kibosh on a Miami-on-Hudson, which I support, of course.

The impetus for residential towers by the riverside was the pair of 16-story green-glass towers on Perry at West Street designed by Richard Meier. Reviled here for being modern and of our own time, they became at instant address for the chauffeured set who laid out millions to live dormitory style and look over at the Jersey condo skyline through floor-to-ceiling windows. The Jersey side gets to feast its eyes on pure architecture. The Perry Street towers are radiant and stunning and should one day be a source of pride here, rather than complaint.

Jean-Georges Vongerichten took a floor in one of the towers and also put in a restaurant, which he called Perry St. If you live in the towers, you can get room service. After a hard day of picketing and preserving, there is no more delightful and interesting place around to have a drink than at Perry St.

Quite a few times, I’ve secretly wished that I lived in that tower. Please, please don’t tell the historic society I said that.